Health systems are increasingly rely When it comes to traveling nurses, nurses have more flexible hours, and since the pandemic began, the nurse shortage has only gotten worse, so there’s less time to make do with it.

Although most of the focus is on money – anyone travel agency‘ price or Nurse Retention bonus costs – implications for patient safety and quality of care.

Delaware-based Christiana Care and other systems across the country are grappling with how to maintain quality as large numbers of new nurses face a steep learning curve that can affect patient care.

“Imagine you’re a nurse and you have a set of skills that are theoretically transferable across nursing fields, but there are probably over 50 centerline products in the U.S., dressings [at an individual hospital] May vary, techniques for maintaining it may vary slightly, and prescribed steps around how often the line should be cleaned before and after needle administration may vary: all of these steps are designed to prevent central line bloodstream infections ” said Dr Kert Anzilotti, Chief Medical Officer for Quality and Safety at Christiana Care.

Nurses who typically begin a weeks-long training course in a specific unit are immediately put into bedside care.

“The itinerant nurses and our redeployed people have done a fantastic job for us, but it’s hard to learn a new environment and do it honestly when you’re scared and worried about your own health and that of your family,” Anziloti said .

When all the individual steps to prevent an infection are unknown or slightly different, it can lead to an increase in adverse outcomes. Anzilotti said their data did not see these increases.but it happened at least once Hospital system, according to the most recent Learn In the American Journal of Infection Control.

Researchers at Northwestern Medicine in Illinois charted medically acquired infections for the three-year period ending December 2020 at two hospitals with a total of 1,000 beds. They found a correlation between increased infection rates and institutional care use and overtime during the pandemic.

“Increased focus on compliance with equipment bundling elements, equipment necessity and observation [hospital] Practices including hand hygiene and cleaning should be in place, especially during a pandemic when employees are forced to work in other locations or take advantage of increased institutional staffing,” the authors wrote.

Earlier this month, ECRI It also recognizes that staffing shortages are the biggest risk to patient safety in 2022, a notable move considering previous reports have focused on issues such as diagnostic errors or cybersecurity attacks.

“The adverse events we’re seeing are happening because they’re really exhausted, and that leads to human error,” said Sheila Rossi, director of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a patient safety group, a regulator that collects hospital adverse event reports. “You can’t clearly think that you have too many tasks to do, and that’s a common theme we’re seeing.”

The hospital has also redeployed administrative nursing staff who have held leadership positions but are still licensed to practice, bringing in another tier of workers who lack in-depth training in specific units.

Although there are strong what happens in research patient safety Lack of data on impact when there are not enough nurses to properly care for patients travel Nurse Patient Safety and Quality.

This is largely because there is no master database of how many surrogate nurses a hospital uses at any given time. Dr. Xue Ying, an associate professor in the University of Rochester’s School of Nursing, said most studies in this area are small and come from individual hospitals, which can extract their own institutional nurse data to cross-reference with quality outcomes.Xue posted a Learn In 2012, based on data from her institution, no correlation was found between traveling nurses and quality.

“I was fortunate to be able to collect data from our medical center to study this topic, but that’s why my study has limitations because the results are based on one medical center,” Xue said.

But without a larger study of data from multiple hospitals, there won’t be a clearer answer to how traveling nurses affect quality. A renewed focus on travel nurses and their monetary costs could lead to more research as hospitals look to collaborate more because of the pandemic.

Currently, hospital leaders can focus on specific procedures and create short how-to videos with QR codes for nurses to scan and watch on their phones at the bedside. Alternatively, hospitals can place signs next to medical supplies indicating the order in which they are to be used and instructions for use. Angela Zuick, director of clinical services at medical supplies manufacturer Medline, began working with hospitals to develop these solutions.

“We need to be more proactive, think about what our needs are when we have to use travelers, and integrate some solutions, like first aid kits,” said Zuick, who is also a former critical care nurse manager. “This kind of immediate education is something we should continue to focus on to prepare our travelers or outside employees for success.”